Tips and Resources for Praying the Daily Office
By Rev. Kristen Yates
In last week’s blog post, I introduced the practice of the Daily Office, a wonderful practice to deepen our prayer life and to connect us with others. If you missed that post, you can find it here.
In this week’s post, I would like to provide some tips and resources for engaging this practice. For while it is a helpful and formative practice, it can sometimes feel confusing or cumbersome for the newbie, and the result is that one can try it and quickly abandon it. So don’t do that!
Instead of jumping right into the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) - which contains the Daily Office - or trying to pray all the offices (Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Compline Prayer) right away, I have some other suggestions.
If you are new to this practice, consider the following resources and suggestions:
Pray Daily Prayer. This is a helpful book that you can purchase here from Christ Church Plano. Pray Daily gives you a taste of the practice and is very easy to follow. The book is divided by the days of the week, and includes 4 times of praying each day. Each prayer pulls from the Book of Common Prayer but is much reduced and only takes about 5 minutes to pray. This is a great place to start, especially if one of your personal goals is to pray multiple times a day. (Also, they now have a Pray Daily for Families listed on this page at the top which might interest you.)
Use this online resource: http://dailyoffice2019.com. This is an online version of the Daily Office that automatically updates the readings and other parts of the Daily Office for you each day and for each office. You can even tailor it a bit; for example, you can choose how quickly you want to read through the Scriptures in a given year or two. You can also share your settings with others if you would like to pray this with others.
Pray the Daily Office Booklet by Anglican Pastor. Every few months, Anglican Pastor offers up a new booklet with all the prayers and Scripture readings for the coming seasons. If you are wanting a hard copy of the prayers and want a modified version that is easy to pray alone, this might just be for you. It will take you a few minutes to figure out out how everything fits together, but it is pretty simple to use. Sign up here to receive downloadable booklets you can print.
Pray with others. One of the best ways to learn this practice is to pray with others. So pray it with your spouse or in your Mission Community or with friends. Also consider joining Mission’s staff as we pray Morning Prayer every Tuesday at 10:15 AM in our church offices.
Pray an audio version of the Daily Office. If you are not able to pray it with others, a good way to “pray with others” is to engage an online audio version. Trinity Mission has a good version of this that is updated each day. (Do note: This version takes about 30-40 minutes each time.)
Don’t try to pray all four offices right away. Start with one and add others as you grow into this practice. For some of you, you will find that you will always just pray one of the offices; for others of you, praying all four will be an enriching experience.
Try some non-Anglican Daily Offices. There are numerous versions out there, but this has been my favorite througout the years: Celtic Daily Prayer (This is an online version but you can also order a book.)
Finally, if you have a copy of the BCP and are wanting to learn how to use it, come see me (Rev. Kristen). It’s take some time to get used to it since you have to flip back and forth between pages , but once you get it, you are good to go. Also, next week, I’ll post Morning and Evening Prayer for you on our blog and I’ll briefly describe the different sections of the prayers.